201–210 of 370 posts
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I did google the Maxwell twins, clicking the second result. Got about halfway through before realising wrong twins.. lol
heh. Sorry, I obviously implied the maxwell twins ( RELATED to Robert/Ghislaine ) :-)
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And anyone who thinks their own country isnt doing the same is deluded! The Security Services has to protect a country which means getting involved in everything, organised crime as well as business, and then when they feel things need to change direction, the security services have the tools aka blackmail information to make that change happen... in most cases!
I'm only aware of one case where the US government, without warrant, actively hacked its own citizens using a 0day, which was when the FBI exploited a 0day to compromise users of TOR who, as I recall, were looking to access CSAM. Even when going after a bunch of pedophiles I think there was a good bit of controversy there. I think there may actually have been a warrant for some part of the access, idk. I'm not saying…
And what's the incentive for someone to tell us, if they are? Become another Snowden or Assange or Manning? Not a very compelling outcome...
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Israel is the 3rd largest recipient of US foreign aid receiving 3.2 Billion in US tax dollars in 2017 with only Iraq and Afghanistan receiving more. Reducing foreign aid while America is floundering would be a small step to the road of recovery.
That $3.2 billion works out to roughly 0.01% of the federal budget. Plus much of that money just comes right back to the US economy when it is used to purchase American military equipment. Israeli aid has nothing to do with why the US is "floundering". If anything, bickering over small potatoes like our foreign military aid budget instead of focusing on larger issues like the necessity of our own military budget like…
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And anyone who thinks their own country isnt doing the same is deluded! The Security Services has to protect a country which means getting involved in everything, organised crime as well as business, and then when they feel things need to change direction, the security services have the tools aka blackmail information to make that change happen... in most cases!
I'm only aware of one case where the US government, without warrant, actively hacked its own citizens using a 0day, which was when the FBI exploited a 0day to compromise users of TOR who, as I recall, were looking to access CSAM. Even when going after a bunch of pedophiles I think there was a good bit of controversy there. I think there may actually have been a warrant for some part of the access, idk. I'm not saying…
Wouldn't this likely mean US is much better than other countries to hide such scandals? E.g. maybe because they spend more money on it?
It could also mean that US media cares less about this than Israel media ([1]). Maybe Israel media has significantly more investigative-journalist manpower than US media. This way we, US citizens, would have fewer people researching such scandals.
[1] EDIT: By "cares less" I meant, as in, US media finds such stories less profitable and thus deprioritizes.
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I pointed to a big number because it reveals that the motivation is neither to battle waste and corruption or to provide for those 23,000 Americans. There is obviously much bigger waste and corruption in the domestic military budget. You are singling out Israel because of a specific political complaint about Israel. You admit as much in your last paragraph. That is a perfectly reasonable political opinion to have and…
Again, questioning the motivation of someone who raises a point you don't have an answer for is no better than trying to change the subject when you feel like you can't win on the merits. If you think it's a good use of the money, then defend it. But changing the subject and questioning people's motivations, or insisting that all larger forms of abuse in the military be talked about before anyone can call into questi…
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We do this with plenty of crimes. Murdering your spouse to collect their life insurance policy is punished harsher than murdering your spouse after you come home to find them having an affair. Motivations and intent matter.
It is the same crime. Motivation does not count to guilt. Intent does, but intent is different from motivation. Do I need to explain that?
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> In what sense are we not officially at war with Palestine? In the literal sense. The territories that form Palestine and the West Bank today were part of Egypt and Jordan before the six-day war. Israel occupied these territories during the war, then signed peace treaties with the countries it defeated. The three Arab countries (including Syria) attempted to recapture their territories again in 1973, but failed, and…
That's like saying after d-day, the killing and destruction has become more one sided against the Axis Powers. Nobody takes that as a serious argument that the Allies shouldn't have done it (and please, no Nazi comparisons).
To talk of a "peace process", or even of an entrenchment of the Occupation, you need to acknowledge the existence of a second party to the conflict, who in any practical point of view are in a military struggle, that being a war, with the other party. Maybe you agree with their military-political demands, maybe you disagree. But certainly they exist, and are in fact fighting.
If I were to treat it as reasoning rather than polemic, I would say it's projecting an expected - and feared - possible future backwards into the present. The idea seems to be, "we don't want the Palestinian Arabs to end up as a conquered, dispersed, exiled, or killed former nation, so we treat them as already dead, then cheer for them, being already dead, to rise up and prevent their own deaths ahead of time." That's getting a bit speculative and psychoanalytic, but it does sort of explain the grim, dark "rage against the dying of the light" attitude people display when trying to argue simultaneously that there's no war and that the Palestinian side of the war needs more support.
My objection to the whole complex is: there is no dying of the light. Millions of people are right there, year after year, dealing with various endemic problems because, by and large, the peculiar factionalization of their political system forbids them to do anything else. There's no dramatic moment to wait for. They're just gonna suffer more as long as everyone keeps cheering for them to put victory over coexistence.
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This is ignoring some minor details, like that Israel had to fight some real frigging wars over its bare existence, and is still facing a regional power that calls for its extinction. Looks like Israel isn't getting too much love, at least not here at HN. I maintain that we in Israel are still a very normal, western type society, if you take all these rather extreme circumstances into consideration (and, in addition,…
I wasn't suggesting any value judgement in my post, I'm not really anti-China or anti-Russia either or anything. But I think the notion that Israel is a Western country is largely owed due to geopolitical alliance, not culture or how its state operates. I think what does away with that illusion quickly is the fact that Israel has no civil marriage. In Israel, a Jew cannot marry a Muslim, or a Christian. In the US you…
We are not a state that is governed by clergy, there is a free press and independent courts, there is a competitive political process, therefore your assertion that we are not a 'secular western state' isn't true either.
It is not an exclusively secular state, like France; but other, more mixed models do exist, in practice.
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It's a democracy of the first-class citizens only. Don't forget it's an apartheid state!
This is not grounded in reality. Arab citizens can vote and participate, and there are Arab parties in Israeli government. If you want to see an apartheid, go look at any other country in the middle east. Let's see how Jewish representation looks there...?
This point is scarcely more than a deflection; the fulcrum of Israel's apartheid regime consists primarily in which Arabs are permitted to be citizens, and in particular those whose parents and grandparents were violently driven from Israel's current territory in what Palestinian Arabs call the Nakba [1]. The Israeli government blatantly wants to both claim the right to authorize violence in the occupied territories and blame the nominal governments of those territories for that violence. And however you want to frame the conflict philosophically, the practical reality is that the IDF has vastly more capacity to enact violence than do Hezbollah or Hamas. When was the last time either of them leveled a 10+-story apartment building in Israel [2]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
[2] https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2021/05/12/gaza-al-shorouk-...
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Do you believe boycotting is protected speech? Do you believe American citizens should be allowed to choose who they boycott?
anti-BDS regulations, implemented through either legislation or a governor’s order, require businesses contracting with the state to affirm that they are not participating in a boycott of Israel. I don't know of any laws that have attempted to silence individual citizens or direct their ability to protest as individuals (not businesses who also want government contracts).